Did you even read what you replied to? I wasn't talking about just the us intellegence agencies, but many of the more respected european ones as well. Not to mention the UN's 'determination'. It's "most of the world" whose intelligence agencies I was calling credible.
I did read what I replied to. I don't know how you know what European intelligence agencies were telling their governments, I certainly wouldn't claim to have that information. Certainly, in the run up to the war, the US/UK claimed to have intelligence which suggested that Iraq had WMDs; these claims were disputed by many people. Robin Cook (a former foreign secretary) notably resigned from the cabinet, telling parliament:
Iraq probably has no weapons of mass destruction in the commonly understood sense of the term - namely a credible device capable of being delivered against a strategic city target.
Of course, the French, German and Russian governments didn't publically state that they did not have such intelligence - why would they? What intelligence agency would ever admit to not knowing what another one knows? There was no need for them to say what there intelligence was. The debate was framed entirely in terms of if there are weapons then the inspectors will find them.
The weapons inspectors were in Iraq. They were finding nothing, despite being given the US/UK's best intelligence. It is not the case that everyone believed that Iraq had these weapons.
Regarding your mention of "the UN's 'determination'", please remember that it was the US's determination. The UN did not sanction the invasion.
I know I will get crucified and I am by no means an expert but I can't see how "One click", which in my view is completely an absurd patent can be held on the same level as the RSA public/private key patent which seems to hold some validity (at least at a gut feeling level)
Public key cryptography might be a really good idea, but that still doesn't mean it deserves a patent. Certainly as things stand in the EU at the moment it cannot be patented because mathematical methods are not "inventions". How long this will be true remains to be seen. of course.
Nothing this brief note says is unique to software. Stallman might as well be arguing that any time you design a machine, you might infringe someone's mechanical patent without knowing.
There is, however, a very great difference between designing and building a car and writing software. Designing a car requires some fairly expensive machinary and requires a lot of legal hoop-jumping to get it certified as safe. It is very expensive for companies to launch a new range of cars and the patent costs are relatively small in comparison to some of the more capital intensive parts of the project.
With software, there is currently no such barrier to entry. Software can be, and is, written by hobbyists and very small companies as well as the software giants. The introduction of software patents would effectively remove the ability of some of the most innovative workers to compete.
Just make sure your legislator aren't bought by big croporations in the first place.
Even that isn't really enough. Many of the people who will be voting on this don't really understand the issue. Furthermore, the people who are pushing for software patents are being very deceptive. I have had correspondence with politicians who seem to honestly believe that they are voting for restrictions on software patentability when they are doing no such thing.
The important thing is to educate the politicians. Make them understand why the issue is so important and make them understand what the legislation before them really says.
A great battle was won when the European Parliament amended the Commission's directive, but there is still a lot more to do if we are to see final victory.
So let's keep costing the big boys elections until they start pushing for run-offs then, shall we?
That is probably the most insightful comment I have read all day, and an excellent reason to vote 3rd party. I just wish you didn't have to risk getting Bush re-(s)elected to make it happen:-/
Iraq was run by a nutcase who refused to honor a cease fire and was hording wmd's (or so it appeared to most credible intelligence agencies worldwide)
They did a damn poor job of convincing most of the world that the intelligence was credible. Of course, that's because Iraq wasn't hoarding WMDs and Bush&Co. were lying.
Now you have the whole world on notice that the US will hit hard if it feels it must, and now Countries are far less likely to give the US more than token grief on any anti-terrorism actions.
After 9/11, it was unlikely that the US would have got even token grief on anti-terrorism actions (Iraq wasn't an anti-terrorism action, whatever your president tells you). The whole world was on your side. Now it isn't. Your government squandered in incredible amount of sympathy.
When linking to a news source, do you think you could possibly link to one that actually mentions what the story is about next time? We foreigners aren't quite as well up on the latest twists and turns of the campaign as you natives. Then again, judging by the number of republican sponsored links and adverts on that page, I very much doubt that the story is being reported without any bias anyway.
The concept of a president, IMHO, is not a good one... Proportional representation would be a better solution for Britain
Having proportional representation and an elected president are not mutually exlusive. PR is necessary if we are to ever restore confidence in the political process, but it is not sufficient. PR can solve the problem of having an unrepresentative government, but it will not necessarily help in holding the government to account.
There is no reason to believe that MPs would be any better at scrutinising legislation just because they were elected under a fairer system. If they still hold out the hope of being appointed to government positions, they cannot truly serve their constituents when scrutinising legislation brought before them by that government.
We also need an elected president to ensure that there is some restraint on the head of state.
At the moment, as a "constitutional monarchy". the British Prime Minister has significantly more power (in relative terms) than the US President. Tony Blair can act using the "Royal Prerogative" which basically covers a large amount of power that is theoretically wielded by the Queen but is actually wielded by the government on her behalf.
Tony Blair does not legally need to get authorisation from Parliament to declare war. In the case of Iraq, he chose to do so for political reasons, but it was entirely up to him whether or not to put the matter to a vote.
There are plenty of parliamentary systems that work very smoothly without coalition governments: Canada (which recently obtained its first minority government in 27 years and they have 4 parties that actually get elected, and the Green Party is growing exponentially every election), the UK, Australia, New Zealand, etc.
The UK parliamentary system may work "smoothly" but it is entirely useless.
With our first-past-the-post system, one party usually ends up with a massive majority in parliament. The leader of this party then becomes Prime Minister and appoints the government from the elected MPs (from their own party, of course). The result of this is that the government are guaranteed to be able to push through almost any legislation that they desire, regardless of the wishes of electorate.
More importantly, the lack of proportional representation means that we invariably end up with a government that has a massive majority in the House of Commons, but which most people voted against! Since the second world war, no party has received 50% of the popular vote. That hasn't stopped the Conservative and Labour parties from winning "landslide" victories however. At the moment, Tony Blair has a majority in the hundreds, despite only winning 43.2% of the vote at the last election.
We are in dire need of a directly elected president and an elected chamber of people with no expectation of being appointed to cabinet. Don't look to Britain for ideas about how to run a democracy. Our system is rotten to the core.
Just look at the useless (seeming inactive) coalition governments around the world and their regular crises.
There are people who think it is better for governments to be in a perpetual state of crisis. How many new laws do we really need? Good laws should be able to get a cross-party consensus. Why should the government be able to rely on an inate majority to push bad legislation through?
Hopefully UL will also have a positive influence in terms of making Debian's release cycle better.
What's wrong with Debian's release cycle?! Debian is released *when it is ready*. It has always seemed to be a very sensible policy to me. It is certainly part of the reason that there are so many Debian installations that just keep working without causing major hassles.
If you are waiting on a new software release to fix some terrible bug or provide a much needed feature, then long release cycles can be a problem. However, with Debian, you always have the choice of installing packages from the testing or unstable distributions if there is a new feature that you want.
So, why would you want to change their release cycle. If it ain't broke - don't fix it.
It has been reported the Pruce Berens is attempting to bring slashdot down by furiously typing at his keyboard to reply to every single slashdot post creating a human DDOS attack.
LOL!:o)
It certainly looks that way. According to his user page, he has only replied to 10 so far. He certainly does a good job of getting noticed!
We have almost saturation CCTV coverage in the UK. It doesn't make a great deal of difference. You just find that all the kids who want to cause trouble are all wearing grey tops with hoods and/or baseball caps. There is not a lot a camera can do when they all look the same, all over town, every day.
John W. Eaton, developer of GNU Octave. John has been developing the project for over a decade and has produced a serious rival to Matlab for numerical computation. All scientists and engineers should be aware of Octave.
Are you implying those facts weren't being gathered? Or do you think that, as commander in chief, Bush should have somehow had access to all the nations air traffic control systems, being an expert on them, to assess the situation?
By the time he heard about the attacks, there most certainly would have been plenty of information available for him to hear. The fact that he is not an expert on all the systems which would have been providing information is exactly why he should have been familiarising himself with the situation straight away. How could he make the necessary decisions without being aware of what information was available and without an understanding of how it all fitted together. To gain the necessary understanding, he should have been speaking to those who knew, not reading a children's book.
Moore: "Shame on you Mr. President for leaving those kids, scared, not knowing what's going on, maybe even thinking a nuclear weapon was headed their way. Is that any way to present yourself as a cool, calm, commander in chief?"
It would have been perfectly possible for him to excuse himself without frightening the children.
The whole issue is just silly... it's one of those "damned if you do, damned if you don't." The whole "war on terror" is the same way, and frankly it would be regardless who was president...
But it was this president who decided to have a "war on terror"! (Followed by an unjustified war in Iraq while the rest of his government launched their "war on civil liberties")
You mean the 7 minutes where Bush's subordinates WERE gathering facts? Or did you expect Bush to jump to his feet and make an immediate decision with absolutely no information yet?
No, I would have expected him to jump to his feet and immediately start familiarising himself with the available information so that he would be in a position to make a timely decision (if required) regarding the fate of the civilians that he is sworn to protect.
I might be missing something but how does the ability to program a VCR make anybody more/less intelligent than others?
Anyone who can program a VCR *and* votes has found a way to convince the polling station staff that they are old enough to vote despite clear evidence to the contrary. That must take some intelligence.
This election hasn't been about issues anyway. It's about Bush during 9/11 or Kerry during Vietnam.
It may not have been about the usual domestic issues, but surely the president's handling of events during and after an act of terrorism on the scale of 9/11 is a serious issue. Would you want the same person in charge if it happens again? Do you think the same person could prevent it from happening again?
But when he harps on the 7 minutes it took Bush to leave from his book-reading session I realized how shameful Moore truly is.
Would that be the seven minutes when someone should have been deciding whether or not to shoot down planes full of civilians? The seven minutes when someone should have been gathering all available facts and providing leadership when it could possibly have made a difference?
Shouldn't this be presented to the UN?
I mean, why should only America share their findings? Shouldn't all nations, no matter how small their medical research budget, share whatever they can?
Well, considering that taxes aren't paid (directly) to the UN, and that US taxpayers pay for far more research through the NIH than the WHO, I think a national policy is the right way forwards. Besides, once the US starts doing this, the rest of the world won't be far behind.
If most US research is made available in open-access journals, it will be those journals that get the most subscribers and citations. This will make these attractive journals for all researchers to publish in which will put pressure on restricted-access journals - if they can't convince the best researchers to publish in them, they won't be held in high esteem for long.
Today computers are dualistic; they have a screen area, this is where you input information, but it is violate. And they have a disk area which is permanent storage, but you need to explicitly save to that storage. There used to be a good reason for this behaviour, but today there is nothing wrong with storing every keystroke you input.
Shhh! Don't let David Blunkett hear you! If he finds out that computers can do this, he will make it illegal not to use keylogging.
the DBFS does not store system files: No shared libraries, no font files or others like that. These are not documents, not files you look up at a day to day basis, and have no place in a file system.
Whether or not you look at system files every day probably depends on what you are doing with your machine and what you consider "system files" to be. Moreover, this idea would seem to go entirely against the whole UNIX "everything is a file" philosophy which is supposed to be one of the great strengths of UNIX.
Slashdot Mirror
I did read what I replied to. I don't know how you know what European intelligence agencies were telling their governments, I certainly wouldn't claim to have that information. Certainly, in the run up to the war, the US/UK claimed to have intelligence which suggested that Iraq had WMDs; these claims were disputed by many people. Robin Cook (a former foreign secretary) notably resigned from the cabinet, telling parliament:
Of course, the French, German and Russian governments didn't publically state that they did not have such intelligence - why would they? What intelligence agency would ever admit to not knowing what another one knows? There was no need for them to say what there intelligence was. The debate was framed entirely in terms of if there are weapons then the inspectors will find them.
The weapons inspectors were in Iraq. They were finding nothing, despite being given the US/UK's best intelligence. It is not the case that everyone believed that Iraq had these weapons.
Regarding your mention of "the UN's 'determination'", please remember that it was the US's determination. The UN did not sanction the invasion.
Public key cryptography might be a really good idea, but that still doesn't mean it deserves a patent. Certainly as things stand in the EU at the moment it cannot be patented because mathematical methods are not "inventions". How long this will be true remains to be seen. of course.
There is, however, a very great difference between designing and building a car and writing software. Designing a car requires some fairly expensive machinary and requires a lot of legal hoop-jumping to get it certified as safe. It is very expensive for companies to launch a new range of cars and the patent costs are relatively small in comparison to some of the more capital intensive parts of the project.
With software, there is currently no such barrier to entry. Software can be, and is, written by hobbyists and very small companies as well as the software giants. The introduction of software patents would effectively remove the ability of some of the most innovative workers to compete.
Even that isn't really enough. Many of the people who will be voting on this don't really understand the issue. Furthermore, the people who are pushing for software patents are being very deceptive. I have had correspondence with politicians who seem to honestly believe that they are voting for restrictions on software patentability when they are doing no such thing.
The important thing is to educate the politicians. Make them understand why the issue is so important and make them understand what the legislation before them really says.
A great battle was won when the European Parliament amended the Commission's directive, but there is still a lot more to do if we are to see final victory.
Get writing!
That is probably the most insightful comment I have read all day, and an excellent reason to vote 3rd party. I just wish you didn't have to risk getting Bush re-(s)elected to make it happen :-/
They did a damn poor job of convincing most of the world that the intelligence was credible. Of course, that's because Iraq wasn't hoarding WMDs and Bush&Co. were lying.
Now you have the whole world on notice that the US will hit hard if it feels it must, and now Countries are far less likely to give the US more than token grief on any anti-terrorism actions.
After 9/11, it was unlikely that the US would have got even token grief on anti-terrorism actions (Iraq wasn't an anti-terrorism action, whatever your president tells you). The whole world was on your side. Now it isn't. Your government squandered in incredible amount of sympathy.
When linking to a news source, do you think you could possibly link to one that actually mentions what the story is about next time? We foreigners aren't quite as well up on the latest twists and turns of the campaign as you natives. Then again, judging by the number of republican sponsored links and adverts on that page, I very much doubt that the story is being reported without any bias anyway.
Having proportional representation and an elected president are not mutually exlusive. PR is necessary if we are to ever restore confidence in the political process, but it is not sufficient. PR can solve the problem of having an unrepresentative government, but it will not necessarily help in holding the government to account.
There is no reason to believe that MPs would be any better at scrutinising legislation just because they were elected under a fairer system. If they still hold out the hope of being appointed to government positions, they cannot truly serve their constituents when scrutinising legislation brought before them by that government.
We also need an elected president to ensure that there is some restraint on the head of state. At the moment, as a "constitutional monarchy". the British Prime Minister has significantly more power (in relative terms) than the US President. Tony Blair can act using the "Royal Prerogative" which basically covers a large amount of power that is theoretically wielded by the Queen but is actually wielded by the government on her behalf.
Tony Blair does not legally need to get authorisation from Parliament to declare war. In the case of Iraq, he chose to do so for political reasons, but it was entirely up to him whether or not to put the matter to a vote.
The UK parliamentary system may work "smoothly" but it is entirely useless.
With our first-past-the-post system, one party usually ends up with a massive majority in parliament. The leader of this party then becomes Prime Minister and appoints the government from the elected MPs (from their own party, of course). The result of this is that the government are guaranteed to be able to push through almost any legislation that they desire, regardless of the wishes of electorate.
More importantly, the lack of proportional representation means that we invariably end up with a government that has a massive majority in the House of Commons, but which most people voted against! Since the second world war, no party has received 50% of the popular vote. That hasn't stopped the Conservative and Labour parties from winning "landslide" victories however. At the moment, Tony Blair has a majority in the hundreds, despite only winning 43.2% of the vote at the last election.
We are in dire need of a directly elected president and an elected chamber of people with no expectation of being appointed to cabinet. Don't look to Britain for ideas about how to run a democracy. Our system is rotten to the core.
There are people who think it is better for governments to be in a perpetual state of crisis. How many new laws do we really need? Good laws should be able to get a cross-party consensus. Why should the government be able to rely on an inate majority to push bad legislation through?
What's wrong with Debian's release cycle?! Debian is released *when it is ready*. It has always seemed to be a very sensible policy to me. It is certainly part of the reason that there are so many Debian installations that just keep working without causing major hassles.
If you are waiting on a new software release to fix some terrible bug or provide a much needed feature, then long release cycles can be a problem. However, with Debian, you always have the choice of installing packages from the testing or unstable distributions if there is a new feature that you want.
So, why would you want to change their release cycle. If it ain't broke - don't fix it.
LOL! :o)
It certainly looks that way. According to his user page, he has only replied to 10 so far. He certainly does a good job of getting noticed!
So how is estimating a quantity different from predicting the value of a future measurement of that quantity, or vice versa?
We have almost saturation CCTV coverage in the UK. It doesn't make a great deal of difference. You just find that all the kids who want to cause trouble are all wearing grey tops with hoods and/or baseball caps. There is not a lot a camera can do when they all look the same, all over town, every day.
Kerry wasn't Commander-in-Chief.
I'm not above sucking up for some easy karma.
Missing option; CowboyNeal is going to be mad at you for missing him out. Kiss your karma goodbye ...
John W. Eaton, developer of GNU Octave. John has been developing the project for over a decade and has produced a serious rival to Matlab for numerical computation. All scientists and engineers should be aware of Octave.
By the time he heard about the attacks, there most certainly would have been plenty of information available for him to hear. The fact that he is not an expert on all the systems which would have been providing information is exactly why he should have been familiarising himself with the situation straight away. How could he make the necessary decisions without being aware of what information was available and without an understanding of how it all fitted together. To gain the necessary understanding, he should have been speaking to those who knew, not reading a children's book.
Moore: "Shame on you Mr. President for leaving those kids, scared, not knowing what's going on, maybe even thinking a nuclear weapon was headed their way. Is that any way to present yourself as a cool, calm, commander in chief?"
It would have been perfectly possible for him to excuse himself without frightening the children.
The whole issue is just silly... it's one of those "damned if you do, damned if you don't." The whole "war on terror" is the same way, and frankly it would be regardless who was president...
But it was this president who decided to have a "war on terror"! (Followed by an unjustified war in Iraq while the rest of his government launched their "war on civil liberties")
No, I would have expected him to jump to his feet and immediately start familiarising himself with the available information so that he would be in a position to make a timely decision (if required) regarding the fate of the civilians that he is sworn to protect.
Anyone who can program a VCR *and* votes has found a way to convince the polling station staff that they are old enough to vote despite clear evidence to the contrary. That must take some intelligence.
It may not have been about the usual domestic issues, but surely the president's handling of events during and after an act of terrorism on the scale of 9/11 is a serious issue. Would you want the same person in charge if it happens again? Do you think the same person could prevent it from happening again?
Would that be the seven minutes when someone should have been deciding whether or not to shoot down planes full of civilians? The seven minutes when someone should have been gathering all available facts and providing leadership when it could possibly have made a difference?
Well, considering that taxes aren't paid (directly) to the UN, and that US taxpayers pay for far more research through the NIH than the WHO, I think a national policy is the right way forwards. Besides, once the US starts doing this, the rest of the world won't be far behind.
If most US research is made available in open-access journals, it will be those journals that get the most subscribers and citations. This will make these attractive journals for all researchers to publish in which will put pressure on restricted-access journals - if they can't convince the best researchers to publish in them, they won't be held in high esteem for long.
Shhh! Don't let David Blunkett hear you! If he finds out that computers can do this, he will make it illegal not to use keylogging.
Whether or not you look at system files every day probably depends on what you are doing with your machine and what you consider "system files" to be. Moreover, this idea would seem to go entirely against the whole UNIX "everything is a file" philosophy which is supposed to be one of the great strengths of UNIX.